The Thought Occurs

Wednesday 1 November 2017

Meaning "Beyond" The Clause

Halliday & Hasan (1976: 10):
It will be clear from what has been said above that cohesion is not just another name for discourse structure.  Discourse structure is, as the name implies, a type of structure; the term is used to refer to the structure of some postulated unit higher than the sentence, for example the paragraph, or some larger entity such as an episode or topic unit.

Note that the units postulated by Martin (1992: 325, 385) for discourse semantic structure — move, participant, message, message part — are not 'higher than the sentence', and have no postulated internal structure.

As Halliday & Hasan (1976) theorised, on the SFL model, "meaning beyond the clause" is realised by the systems of cohesion, the non-structural resource of the textual metafunction.

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